My argument: Things like article spinning and distribution are pretty much pointless. I used UniqueArticleWizard for a while when I first started out with SEO. It gave me around 1000 PR0 backlinks. A few weeks later my site was penalised from PR5 to PR2.

Google updates public PR rarely these days... you could have a good site with PR0 for months so not a very good way to judge the risk or benefit that way. In fact if you have a history of buying links with same anchor text from high PR sites over a period of time you could trigger a penalty more so then with crappy little low quality links.